XulBrowser Project

XulBrowser is a internet web browser written in Java that is designed to run trusted web applications as if they were normal applications like Microsoft Word. Applications are executed in their own window using XUL and JS for application code. The program code is put on your web server where the client can run it like an actual program. Unlike running a XUL file in Mozilla over the web, XulBrowser will give the application an actual application window and full access rights to the users system.

The application browser is targeted for organizations who wish to deploy applications over a large network and be able to keep everybody's program synchronized without having to deal with security in the web application model. This saves money in upgrade costs and allows the software users to always be running the latest version. It also makes it easier to interact with MySQL databases and perform other server operations because PHP or ASP code could be inseted in your XUL files.

The code for your web app would be done in XUL and JavaScript, plus DTD files for localization. You can also make your GUI code under a file extension like .php, .jsp, or .asp to include server-side coding with your GUI. You can also use the API to integrate your Java program to retrieve and run a XUL program over a web server for certain operations, such as special user dialogs.

Technical side

For XUL parsing, we will use the XulParser API supplied by the MozCreator Project. The MozCreator API also provides integration with Rhino, mozilla.org's JavaScript parser written in Java for full ECMAScript support, while at the same time having access to the entire Java library. We plan on extending JavaScript a bit by providing a number of connections to MySQL and other ways to make your XUL/JS programs more powerful.